Wednesday, May 17, 2017

If you
can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

Former Federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy assesses one of
the current Trumpian firestorms: the one that involves mishandling classified
information.

He finds, among other things, that the media and the
Democratic Party shockingly have a double standard when it comes to Trump.

In his words:

When
Democrats mishandle classified information, they are earnest progressives who
understandably suffer the occasional lapse while struggling to make the
international community a better place. When Republicans do it, they are
incompetent morons.

I’m not
suggesting that Trump be cut slack. This seems like it could be a serious
error, and one that was easily avoidable. But after a couple of years of
hearing the Iran deal and Mrs. Clinton’s homebrew server explained away, I’m
just wondering when the media suddenly got so interested again in harmful White
House dealings with hostile powers and the proper safeguarding of classified
information.

The next question is: did Trump do something that was
completely out of the ordinary or did he do something that other heads of state
routinely do?

McCarthy continues:

All
that said, how unusual is this sort of thing, really? It is a good question
that Steve
Hayward raises at Power Line —
along with a Washington Post report
reminding us that, less than a year ago, the Obama
administration was offering to share with Russia intelligence about
ISIS operations in Syria . . . which sounds an awful lot
like what Trump was doing.

He makes his case:

When
Osama bin Laden was killed, President Obama was not content to explain that
fact to the American people. His administration gratuitously disclosed that the
raid on the al-Qaeda emir’s compound in Pakistan produced a “trove” of
actionable intelligence. From a national-security standpoint, this political
grandstanding was a foolish: It gave al-Qaeda operatives a heads-up that their
cells and activities had likely been exposed, providing them the opportunity to
disappear before our forces could roll them up. And then there is the Obama
administration’s leak disclosing (to
the Washington Post)
General Michael Flynn’s conversations with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak.
This was done with obvious malevolence to hurt Flynn and Trump (who had named
Flynn national-security adviser). The beneficiary, however, was Russia. It
received valuable information that its ambassador was under surveillance and
that whatever countermeasures the Kremlin’s intelligence services had been
taking had failed. This is apt to make Russian operatives more difficult to
monitor in the future.

As for President Obama’s relationship with Putin, we all
know and have known for a long time that Obama was the best thing that ever
happened to Putin.

McCarthy explains:

More to
the point, does anyone believe that American presidents other than Trump do not
make highly questionable disclosures in their negotiations with hostile
regimes? Remember when Obama told Putin’s factotum, Medvedev, to tell ol’ Vlad
he’d have much more “flexibility” to accommodate Russian concerns after his
2012 reelection — patently signaling that Putin should just be patient and not
pay too much attention to campaign rhetoric about dealing sternly with Moscow?

Undoubtedly, the most dangerous action Obama performed in
office was giving Iran a path toward acquiring nuclear weapons. We recall that
Bill Clinton did a similar deal with North Korea. Now that we are facing a nuclear North Korea no one wants to talk about who made that possible.

McCarthy offers some comments about another deal that was far more dangerous than anything Trump is accused of doing:

And
what of the to-and-fro over Obama’s coveted Iran nuclear deal? Is it necessary
to remind Democrats that Obama entered secret side deals with the “death to
America” regime that were withheld from Congress and the American people? That
was not an instance of what Trump was apparently doing — sharing some intel
with a hostile government in the (probably naïve) hope of getting cooperation
from that government against a common enemy. Obama was actually partnering with
a hostile regime through arrangements that were against American interests and
that promoted Iranian interests.

And also:

Of
course, the media and the intelligence bureaucracy happily gobbled up the Ben
Rhodes fiction that the Iranian regime was “moderating,” and that Obama’s
nuclear deal was the only alternative to war. So it was “anything goes.” That
wasn’t planeloads of intel that Obama was covertly sending to the world’s
leading state sponsor of terrorism; it was planeloads of cash. But to judge
from the coverage, this was apparently okay because, after all, he’s Obama —
the smartest, most thoughtful, most sophisticated negotiator in the history of
negotiators.

And, let’s not forget the general media insouciance about
Hillary Clinton’s private email server, something that risked compromising all
of her classified intelligence.

McCarthy explains:

You
should read the FBI reports of interviews with Mrs. Clinton’s former State
Department staffers sometime. In explaining their actions, in the context of an
investigation about the mishandling — the serial mishandling — of classified information, one of the
themes that comes through is: Statecraft involves a lot of exchanges of
sensitive information with foreign governments; sometimes tough calls about
transmitting information have to be made in the heat of the moment, and it’s
not always practical to weigh carefully the need to safeguard information
against the imperative of getting it into the right hands promptly.

The
lesson appears to be that if administration officials repeat often enough the
party line that “we were all working really hard, we all understand that
classified information is really important, and we all really did our best to
protect it,” the media and intelligence-agency chiefs will forgive the
transmission and storage of even thousands of classified e-mails on an
unsecured server that was undoubtedly hacked by hostile intelligence services.

7 comments:

President Buraq Obama left an advanced RQ-170 drone on the ground in Iran and allowed the Mad Mullahs of Persia to swarm it and loot billions of dollars in top secret technology development. Which, naturally, was made available to Persian allies like North Korea.

And of course there is a double standard in partisan politics and it always has to do with trust. If you trust someone to do the right thing, you'll tend to rationalize what he did was the best he could do, and if you distrust someone, you'll fear his decision wasn't in our country's best interest, and project personal motives, like a desire to be liked.

Myself, I'm glad President Trump confessed his actions, and expressed with similar conviction as Pee-wee Herman after falling on his bicycle saying "I meant to do that."

Trump's real problem is not that the Democrats don't trust him. Its that his own White House Staff are willing to expose his actions to the world. That's an extreme betrayal that can't be ignored.

Who knew that a sensible idea like "America First" could be so threatening to so many loud voices? Makes you wonder where the opposite of "America First" has been getting us the last 25 years. Maybe it's not a double standard... maybe it's a single standard that's become the D.C. conventional wisdom, and it's being threatened. I don't view them as a very sympathetic bunch.

"We are gonna win, win, win. We're going to win with military, we're going to win at the borders, we're going to win with trade, we're going to win at everything. And some of you are friends and you're going to call, and you're going to say, 'Mr. President, please, we can't take it anymore, we can't win anymore like this, Mr. President, you're driving us crazy, you're winning too much, please Mr. President, not so much, and I'm going to say I'm sorry, we're going to keep winning because we are going to make America great again."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daOH-pTd_nk Donald Trump: You gonna win so much you may even get tired of winning